Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

My father’s death had been kept from me. I did not know its exact circumstances or even the date. He died when I was ten. At thirteen I was still expected to believe a fable about his being in England. I kept waiting for him to send for me, for my life was deeply wretched and I took it for granted he knew. Finally I began to suspect that death and silence can be one. How to be sure? Head-on questions got me nowhere. I had to create a situation in which some adult (not my mother, who was far too sharp) would lose all restraint and hurl the truth at me. It was easy: I was an artist at this. What I had not foreseen was the verbal violence of the scene or the effect it might have. The storm that seemed to break in my head, my need to maintain the pose of indifference (“What are you telling me that for? What makes you think I care?”) were such a strain that I had physical reactions, like stigmata, which doctors would hopelessly treat on and off for years and which vanished when I became independent. The other change was that if anyone asked about my father I said, “Oh, he died.” Now, in Montreal, I could confront the free adult world of falsehood and evasion on an equal footing; they would be forced to talk to me as they did to each other. Making appointments to meet my father’s friends — Mr. Archie McEwen, Mr. Stephen Ross-Colby, Mr. Quentin Keller — I left my adult name, “Miss Muir.” These were the men who eight, nine, ten years ago had asked, “Do you like your school?” — not knowing what else to say to children. I had curtsied to them and said, “Good night.” I think what I wanted was special information about despair, but I should have known that would be taboo in a place where “like” and “don’t like” were heavy emotional statements.

Archie McEwen, my father’s best friend, or the man I mistook for that, kept me standing in his office on St. James Street West, he standing too, with his hands behind his back, and he said the following — not reconstructed or approximate but recalled, like “The religions of ancient Greece and Rome are extinct” or “O come, let us sing unto the Lord”:

“Of course, Angus was a very sick man. I saw him walking along Sherbrooke Street. He must have just come out of hospital. He couldn’t walk upright. He was using a stick. Inching along. His hair had turned gray. Nobody knew where Charlotte had got to, and we’d heard you were dead. He obviously wasn’t long for this world either. He had too many troubles for any one man. I crossed the street because I didn’t have the heart to shake hands with him. I felt terrible.”

Savage? Reasonable? You can’t tell, with those minds. Some recent threat had scared them. The Depression was too close, just at their heels. Archie McEwen did not ask where I was staying or where I had been for the last eight years; in fact, he asked only two questions. In response to the first I said, “She is married.”

There came a gleam of interest — distant, amused: “So she decided to marry him, did she?”

My mother was highly visible; she had no secrets except unexpected ones. My father had nothing but. When he asked, “Would you like to spend a year in England with your Aunt Dorothy?” I had no idea what he meant and I still don’t. His only brother, Thomas, who was killed in 1918, had not been married; he’d had no sisters, that anyone knew. Those English mysteries used to be common. People came out to Canada because they did not want to think about the Thomases and Dorothys anymore. Angus was a solemn man, not much of a smiler. My mother, on the other hand — I won’t begin to describe her, it would never end — smiled, talked, charmed anyone she didn’t happen to be related to, swam in scandal like a partisan among the people. She made herself the central figure in loud, spectacular dramas which she played with the houselights on; you could see the audience too. That was her mistake; they kept their reactions, like their lovemaking, in the dark. You can imagine what she must have been in this world where everything was hushed, muffled, disguised: she must have seemed all they had by way of excitement, give or take a few elections and wars. It sounds like a story about the old and stale, but she and my father had been quite young eight and ten years before. The dying man creeping along Sherbrooke Street was thirty-two. First it was light chatter, then darker gossip, and then it went too far ( he was ill and he couldn’t hide it; she had a lover and didn’t try); then suddenly it became tragic, and open tragedy was disallowed. And so Mr. Archie McEwen could stand in his office and without a trace of feeling on his narrow Lowland face — not unlike my father’s in shape — he could say, “I crossed the street.”

Stephen Ross-Colby, a bachelor, my father’s painter chum: the smell of his studio on St. Mark Street was the smell of a personal myth. I said timidly, “Do you happen to have anything of his — a drawing or anything?” I was humble because I was on a private, personal terrain of vocation that made me shy even of the dead.

He said, “No, nothing. You could ask around. She junked a lot of his stuff and he junked the rest when he thought he wouldn’t survive. You might try …” He gave me a name or two. “It was all small stuff,” said Ross-Colby. “He didn’t do anything big.” He hurried me out of the studio for a cup of coffee in a crowded place — the Honey Dew on St. Catherine Street, it must have been. Perhaps in the privacy of his studio I might have heard him thinking. Years after that he would try to call me “Lynn,” which I never was, and himself “Steve.” He’d come into his own as an artist by then, selling wash drawings of Canadian war graves, sun-splashed, wisteria-mauve, lime-green, with drifts of blossom across the name of the regiment; gained a reputation among the heartbroken women who bought these impersonations, had them framed — the only picture in the house. He painted the war memorial at Caen. (“Their name liveth forever.”) His stones weren’t stones but mauve bubbles — that is all I have against them. They floated off the page. My objection wasn’t to “He didn’t do anything big” but to Ross-Colby’s way of turning the dead into thistledown. He said, much later, of that meeting, “I felt like a bastard, but I was broke, and I was afraid you’d put the bite on me.”

Let me distribute demerits equally and tell about my father’s literary Jewish friend, Mr. Quentin Keller. He was older than the others, perhaps by some twelve years. He had a whispery voice and a long pale face and a daughter older than I. “Bossy Wendy” I used to call her when, forced by her parents as I was by mine, Bossy Wendy had to take a whole afternoon of me. She had a room full of extraordinary toys, a miniature kitchen in which everything worked, of which all I recall her saying is “Don’t touch.” Wendy Keller had left Smith after her freshman year to marry the elder son of a Danish baron. Her father said to me, “There is only one thing you need to know and that is that your father was a gentleman.”

Jackass was what I thought. Yes, Mr. Quentin Keller was a jackass. But he was a literary one, for he had once written a play called Forbearance , in which I’d had a role. I had bounded across the stage like a tennis ball, into the arms of a young woman dressed up like an old one, and cried my one line: “Here I am, Granny!” Of course, he did not make his living fiddling about with amateur theatricals; thanks to our meeting I had a good look at the inside of a conservative architect’s private office — that was about all it brought me.

What were they so afraid of, I wondered. I had not yet seen that I was in a false position where they were concerned; being “Miss Muir” had not made equals of us but lent distance. I thought they had read my true passport, the invisible one we all carry, but I had neither the wealth nor the influence a provincial society requires to make a passport valid. My credentials were lopsided: the important half of the scales was still in the air. I needed enormous collateral security — fame, an alliance with a powerful family, the power of money itself. I remember how Archie McEwen, trying to place me in some sensible context, to give me a voucher so he could take me home and show me to his wife, perhaps, asked his second question: “Who inherited the —?”